


I’ll be your conmate

by yue_ix



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Characters cosplaying, Conventions, Cosplay, Costumes, F/M, Fanart, Photoshop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-01-19
Packaged: 2017-11-25 22:00:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/643399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yue_ix/pseuds/yue_ix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Going to conventions is practically a rite of passage for us geeks, right?" said Erica.</p><p>"Da fuck," said Stiles. "Can't any of you use the door? Get your paws off my co-- oh, of <i>course</i> you like Millerverse."</p><p>Erica popped her bubblegum bubble and smiled at Stiles. "So do you. There's one this summer. We're going."</p><p>Stiles spun his chair around to sit on it backward. "Suuure. Next thing we'll make our own matching costumes."</p><p>/</p><p>or: The One Where Stiles and Erica Cosplay Batman and Catwoman At Their First Comic Convention.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The finished drawing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kazuhachen](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=kazuhachen).



> Done on kazuhachen’s prompt “Stiles and Erica trick or treating/cosplaying as Batman and Catwoman”.
> 
> See chapter 2 for work in progress shots and artist free talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This piece can also be found and reblogged from: [here on tumblr](http://yue-ix.tumblr.com/post/40734184240/ill-be-your-conmate-erica-stiles-as). 
> 
> See chapter 2 for work in progress shots and artist free talk.


	2. WIP and artist free talk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Work in progress screencaps over the several days this took to make, along with plenty of free talk about process and thoughts.

Alright, so this all started by a request for prompts on my twitter, where kazuhachen gave me “Stiles and Erica trick or treating/cosplaying as Batman and Catwoman”.

Cosplaying immediately came to mind because cosplays are awesome, I love a fanwork in one media involving fanworks in another media, and characters-doing-fannish-things is FTW. What does cosplay mean? Cosplay means convention! :DD (Well, not only, but re: characters doing fannish things love, and it seems like something they could have always wanted to do but never did.)

The second thing needed to get started was a viable sketch. Hence: several sketches one after the other, until I find one I like or that feels right.

 

That done, I had to choose _which_ Batman and which Catwoman they'd cosplay as. Now, my fiancé has been playing Arkham Asylum for a while, so that was foremost to my mind so I went with that design for Stiles, and it felt in character that they'd kind of want to match universes.

So now we're at a stage where I needed references pictures so as to define the sketch. Thank you, Bing image. I like to start with faces, because it often sets up the whole mood, which then bleeds into the body language. Look a ttheir gorgeous faces! Ericaaaaaa. You should always smile. <333

 

 

Then moving on to the body and more references. You can start seeing the silly named layers piling up progressively. Naming layers is important when working on a project over several days, or if I want to touch it up later. Naming significantly =/= naming seriously though. In fact, layer names that I can still distinguish yet make me smile very much improve my mood when I've been working on something for hours. =P

 

 

 

(How much did I quickly learn to HATE the body language of that Batman reference vs that Catwoman one? Real fast. )

 

 

You might notice that by this point their costume was already different from the ones in the references. I sort of realised that these didn't have nearly enough amount of leather and shiny material on them. That made my head-canon Erica sad, and me too because I was looking forward to inking shiny black masses later. But that magic of cospaly means that someone adapated the costumes - so it felt logical that Erica would have elected to change the material when making hers (and vetoed that Stiles still had to match). Looking at people's cosplays of this universe online, I found that a good many of them had made the same decision, so, yay! :D  I observed a few of those costumes' seams and pattern choices and translated them unto Erica's too. No one will ever notice but it makes me happy. 

Moving on, here I got avanced enough I can get rid of the initial chosen sketch and work on cleaning up this more complete one.

 

 

Bellow the parts that would be in full-black were filled out so I could have an idea of what it'd look like, how it'd balance or not and make energetic lines.  

 

 

Now realising making this a convention means I'll need to put in an actual background. Ugh. 

 

 

How it all looks together so far.

 

 

There's areas that'll be full black, and others that'd be heavy grey, so filling those too to check how the empty vs filled spaces look & balance again. It'll help me orient and choose light reflections on the shiny black whenever there's some white needed over there.

 

 

INKING TIME. WOOT. Seriously, my favourite part of any drawing. If I could ink all the time I would. I wish more people would post sketches and be all "somebody please ink this for me" so I could go "HELL YES" and just do it. Inking involves adding final details since the sketches are fairly simple here, so the references are back. 

 

 

That's the time in the right bottom corner, it's now just past midday. Yay pause for food because I forgot to eat breakfast despite being up since 7. Turned into a long pause.

 

 

Making details that won't ever show but make me happy to do. It's real cool to get these things noticed and commented on, sure, and sometimes it feels worthless to do them if no one can conceivable see them anyway. But then I remind myself that there's no one to please and impress here but me. When I'm making this stuff I got to make it fun * **for me** * or it'll just get dropped halfway through, or, worst, I'll be disapointed by the time it's done. So I have to remind me every time that it's never worthless if it makes me happy. Good art is art that made me feel good or feel better to do. 

 

 

I loove the scratches on Stiles' costume' chest. The AA costume gets all those scratches from playing the game, so it felt right for them to aim for some accuracy and ask Erica to scratch it for him. (Or maybe it just happened, like, while finishing up the costume while staking out someplace he got attacked and the cloth got ripped and they didn't have enough time to start over. Living a dangerous life there, guys!)

 

 

Wee, making the different cosplay pieces not completely meeting up properly to add some tear-and-wear to them. 

 

 

AHAHAHA. Right. I go to bed around 9pm, so this is nearing my bedtime. I was real tired of working on this non stop full focus and took it out on the drawing. Re: having fun so as to avoid hating it. (I did get a cupcake. :D )

 

 

 

 

Annnd I went past my time but at least the lineart was all done. Woot! On the following day, I started on the black fillings.

 

 

Using a flashy colour as placeholder so a texture later.

 

 

 

Adding in the non-black now!

 

 

And the background now. I planned on maybe just doing grey shadowy lost-in-a-crowd thing? But have no idea how to do that, couldn't find anything online. I ended up making grey individual figures on different layers and sliding them all together at the end. Look, artists tables! :D  Artist Alleys yay.

 

 

The "bg mingle" layer is actually one layer where I doodled vague humanish shapes. Then I duplicated that layer a few times, flipped half of them horizontally and resized them. It worked well enough.

 

 

And now how it all looks together:

 

 

AND WE'RE DONE!  Congratulations on making it so far. Here's a close up and another view of the final drawing. 

 

 

 

Thank you for checking this! :D


End file.
